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There is a lot of unhappiness out there. And my view is that a lot of it has to do with cars. Sometimes it feels as if the entire driving population of Toronto is in a bad mood. It can’t be healthy.

It’s not as if it does us any good to be irritated at being stuck in a traffic jam so permanent we might as well be adrift in the horse latitudes. And it’s not as if anything is going to change soon.

Still, all is not lost. There are some things we can do to improve the prevailing conditions of vehicular circulation within city limits. And we can start by cheering up.

This won’t be easy. Toronto drivers are many things. Cheerful, alas, is not one of them. But if we agree that car-related unhappiness does nothing to improve traffic — and the evidence of that seems indisputable if considered from the perspective of the Don Valley Parkway at about 4:50 on any weekday afternoon — there should be no reason why we can’t rid ourselves of its cause. And its cause is obvious, as any psychologist will tell you. Toronto suffers from the anxiety of unrealistic expectations. Let me give you an example.

In Toronto, there are many people who think that when they get in a car they are going to get somewhere fairly soon. You see the problem. When we think something should happen but it never does, we tend to get depressed. It’s human nature.

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So my suggestion is this: I believe all Toronto drivers should invert their paradigm. They shouldn’t be overly optimistic when it comes to movement. Indeed, they should hold firm in the belief that if they get more than two blocks without confronting a closed-lane they’ll be lucky. Forget hopping in the car and running downtown to pick something up. That hasn’t happened since 1968. And forget car ads. There are no winding, deserted alpine roads on the way to Etobicoke or Scarborough.

Everything’s going to take forever. You can count on it. Pickering? Are you kidding me? Pack provisions if you want my advice.

That’s because when you get in a car everyone else is doing exactly what you’re doing. Or the opposite. And when the traffic comes to a stop — as it will before the coffee in your cup holder is cool enough to drink — Toronto drivers should not react with impatience. That’s the old mindset. The new driver should feel a certain calm, untroubled acceptance of what is traffic’s natural state in Toronto. In the second decade of the 21st century getting anywhere by car that isn’t where you already are should be viewed as a bonus.

“Well, that’s Toronto for you,” drivers should say with amused forbearance when it takes three green lights to clear the intersection at Bay and Bloor. When drivers watch a section of the Gardiner collapse a few metres in front of their immobile front wheels they should look on the sunny side of the commuting experience. “At least something’s moving,” they should chuckle. If drivers stop worrying about getting somewhere on time, and start marvelling at the amazing fact that despite Toronto’s transit policies past and present, they can actually move a car-length forward every now and then, the entire city would be a better place. Not any faster. Just happier.

This new acceptance of the way things are would also do wonders for cyclists. The hurled profanities that are currently the lingua franca of their relationship with their slower, angrier cousins, the drivers of automobiles, would be greatly reduced if cyclists didn’t go ballistic every time they were cut off, ignored, doored or squeezed into the gutter of what are euphemistically called bike lanes in Toronto. Raging against the inevitable is not a sound approach to psychological well-being.

To be entirely honest about who we are, we need to admit to ourselves that we won’t be going anywhere very quickly on our streets and highways in the foreseeable future. If Toronto is lucky, we’ll be the ones who get to pay so that we can move even more slowly through the mess of subway, LRT and commuter train construction that we should have got serious about 20 years ago. But there’s no reason why we should be so miserable about going nowhere. We’ve been doing it for a while. And Toronto should have figured out by now that being angry about traffic is kind of like refusing to raise new taxes or establish road tolls for public transit. It feels good for a while. But in the long run, it doesn’t do a damn thing.

David Macfarlane's column appears every Thursday in the Entertainment section of the Star. His new novel will be published this fall by HarperCollins.

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